Computing devices, such as laptop computers, netbook computers, or other such devices, often implement a number of power management techniques in order to reduce the amount of power consumed by those devices. In some approaches, such techniques may be used only when the device is operating on battery power, or, in other approaches, may be used regardless of the power source being used (e.g., battery or AC power). Common power management techniques include performing a screen dimming operation for a display panel of a computing device, turning off the screen and/or performing a system suspend operation, where current operating information for a computing device is saved to random access memory (RAM) or to disk (e.g., a hard drive or flash drive) and the computing device is then placed in a very low power operating state.
A suspend-to-RAM state in a computing device may be referred to as “Standby,” “Sleep,” or “Suspend,” depending on the particular embodiment In such a low-power state, aside from powering the random access memory (“RAM”) that is required to restore a computing device's operating state, the computing device attempts to reduce or cut power to all unneeded parts of the machine (e.g., the hard disk(s) stop spinning, the display device is placed into a dark or low-power state, and peripheral devices are de-powered). Such a low-power state often is called Standby (for computing devices running a Microsoft Windows 95—Server 2003 operating system), or is called Sleep (for computing devices running an Apple operating system or a Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 operating system), or Suspend (for computing devices running a Linux operating system). In such a state, the processing functions of the computing device are powered down, and some small amount of power is used to preserve the contents of RAM and support waking up the computing device from the low-power state into an active power state. When the computing device is placed into the Standby, Sleep, or Suspend to RAM state, it typically consumes less than about 20% of the total power that is consumed when the computing device 100 is operating in an active power state.
A suspend-to-disk state in a computing device may be referred to as “Hibernate,” or “Safe Sleep” or “suspend-to-disk,” depending on the particular embodiment. In such a state, the contents of a computing device's RAM are written to non-volatile storage such as a hard disk, as a file or on a separate partition, before powering off the computing device. When the computing device is restarted or resumed from the suspend-to-disk state, it reloads the data that had been written to the non-volatile memory and is, thus, restored to the state it was in when the suspend-to-disk power state was invoked. To enable the suspend-to-disk power state, the hard disk must have sufficient free space to store all non-replaceable contents of RAM. Such a low-power state often is called Hibernate (for computing devices running a Microsoft Windows 95—Server 2003 operating system, a Microsoft Vista operating system or a Microsoft Windows 7 operating system), Safe Sleep (for computing devices running an Apple operating system), or suspend-to-disk (for computing devices running a Linux operating system). When the computing device is placed into the suspend-to-disk power state, it typically consumes about as much power as is consumed when the computing device is powered off.
Such power management techniques may be performed by a computing device when the computing device detects that it has not received any user input (e.g., keyboard or pointing device input) in a specific period of time and has not been explicitly instructed by an interface of an application running on the system to not perform power management activities. For example, a computing device may first dim a computing device's screen after a period of time, and then, sometime later, turn off the screen, and then, sometime even later, perform a system suspend operation, such as those described above.
In certain situations, occurrence of such power management activities may be undesirable and detract from a user's experience when using a given computing device. For instance, if a user is streaming multimedia content, displaying content in a full-screen mode or downloading one or more files using a cloud-based computer or a web browser of a non-cloud based computing device, occurrence of power management actions may detract from the user's experience by disrupting operation of the computing device (e.g., operation of a display screen, an audio system and/or a network interface).